Panel Finds Wide Debate in 40's On the Ethics of Radiation Tests

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In the early years of the cold war, a systematic effort to gain knowledge of the effects of radiation from experiments on human subjects was secretly planned at the highest levels of the United States Government. The number of experiments was some 10 times larger than known until now, but there was also more discussion than expected on the ethics of experimentation.

That is the outline of the complex picture being developed by the President's Committee on Human Radiation Experiments after six months of sifting through the archives of a dozen Federal agencies. The committee has brought to light a wealth of documents about the Government's behavior -- sometimes furtive, sometimes ethical -- that will force historians to rewrite part of the history of the dawn of the atomic age.

In particular, the advisory committee has traced the almost continual jostling between the military's desire for data on radiation and the ethical scruples of some senior officials. Since no clear operating policy emerged, the result was that some ethically dubious experiments were discouraged or disapproved, while others went ahead.

Last year, after The Albuquerque Tribune reported on a group of patients given high doses of radiation treatment for largely experimental purposes, Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary responded by promising to open her agency's files, and President Clinton later ordered the committee to make a detailed inquiry into the experiments.

The Tribune article and the previous instances of unethical radiation experiments discussed by Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, at Congressional hearings in 1986 suggested that a thorough search would extend the litany of horrific stories. They also raised questions as to what ethical guidelines, if any, had governed the experiments, and at what level in the Government the research program had been directed.

Dr. Ruth Faden, an ethicist at Johns Hopkins University who is the chairwoman of the committee, said: "Did we find new horror stories? Well, we know now that much more experimental work was done than anyone guessed."

While the radiation doses received by subjects in most cases were not large, at the time the hazards of low levels of radiation were not known, and consent was not usually sought.

But Dr. Faden did express surprise at the apparent deliberateness of the decision making. "Frankly, we did not believe before we started this that there was much debate and planning done in connection with these experiments," she said. "But there was, and it was at a high level of the military and scientific establishment.

"That is not to say what the motive was for these ethical discussions -- whether it was high-minded moral reasons, or legal reasons or public relations reasons -- but in any case there was an awareness at high levels that one could not proceed in the area of radiation and human experiments just casually. They took it seriously." Serious Talk About Need for Data

Dr. Faden said that from the level of Secretary of Defense on down through the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, there was serious discussion of the military's need for information about how dangerous radiation was to troops, how soldiers might react to it and what precautions were needed. The question was how to get that information, and how often were human experiments necessary.

"We are now piecing together the story of the past, an unsuspected past, to help inform the future on these questions," she said.

Among the papers unearthed by the committee were documents that show experiments were debated, planned and carried out in a layer of atomic medical bureaucracy by half a dozen secret committees, which staff members estimate will increase the number of known experiments at least tenfold, to about 600. Most experiments involved exposing troops to varying amounts of radiation, usually without informing them of the risks or seeking their consent.

At the time, the documents suggest, being the subject of experiments was counted as one of the expected hazards of military life and training -- not unlike subjecting soldiers to live fire in training exercises -- and was not considered to be human experimentation.

The committee also found that, contrary to the belief that there was little debate about the ethics of such experimentation in the 1950's, Army ethical guidelines written in 1953 were in fact far stricter than the current rules.

But the rules -- a nearly verbatim copy of the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical principles that came out of the Nuremberg trials after World War II -- did not become operating guidelines, apparently because they were declared top secret.

One of the most important bits of history found in the hundreds of thousands of documents so far received by the committee, Dr. Faden said, was that a fixture of current ethical debates -- whether it is possible to offer a patient honest treatment and experiment on him at the same time -- appeared to have been a consideration in even the earliest documents of cold war experiments.

An Atomic Energy Commission memorandum dated April 17, 1947, recommended that human experimentation not be made public. "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have an adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits," it says. "Documents covering such work in this field should be classified 'secret.' " The memorandum was also classified secret. Seeking Tests On Human Beings

In the fall of 1947 the A.E.C., which later became the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, established a division of biology and medicine and the Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine, made up of outside experts, to consider future human and animal experimentation.

Two years earlier, 18 patients -- the subjects of The Albuquerque Tribune article -- were injected with plutonium to help track its course in the body. The committee has found that in 1947 the military proposed that more systematic studies be conducted. While this was disapproved, some individual experiments, including the injection of radioactive material into humans, continued in June and July 1947.

After repeated requests from the military and private researchers to conduct radiation experiments on humans, Dr. Shields Warren, the chief medical officer of the A.E.C., said in July 1949 that he was "taking an increasingly dim view of human experimentation."

In 1949 a group called the Joint Panel on the Medical Aspects of Atomic Warfare was created to oversee the atomic-related research in the Defense Department. In the minutes of a meeting of the panel, it was noted that if ethical rules were adopted, "then obviously a great deal of our present human tracer studies must be discontinued." Tracer studies involve injecting minute amounts of radioactive chemical to track the biochemical pathways of the chemical's metabolism in the body.

The minutes also noted that there were "ethical and medico-legal objections to the administration of radioactive materials without the patient's knowledge or consent." And it said there would be a greater culpability of the Government "if a Federal agency condones human guinea pig experimentation."

Since the A.E.C. controlled the supply of radioactive materials, Dr. Warren was apparently able to block some of the worst experiments, which called for total body irradiation of healthy subjects.

But some researchers were able to get around the commission's objections. Hundreds of people were irradiated, primarily at universities, by using cancer patients who presumably might have benefited, or at least whose lives would not be greatly shortened by the experiments.

By 1951, it was clear to the military and their medical establishment that it would be necessary to answer in detail many questions about the effects of radiation on humans, and that soldiers would have to be used at the guinea pigs.

In September 1951 the Joint Panel on the Medical Aspects of Atomic Warfare prepared a memorandum saying that there were numerous reasons to conduct human experiments in atomic bomb explosions, and later documents show that at least four of the human experiments mentioned were carried out. Using 'Volunteers' In the Military

Among the problems that required experiments on humans, the panel said, were whether atomic explosion caused changes in visual acuity or light-blindness, whether radiation from the explosions could be measured in the body fluids of people near such blasts, whether any psychological damage might come from being near an atomic explosion and whether flight crews would have any important exposure if they flew near a nuclear blast. Each of these experiments was carried out.

One of the experiments, called Operation Upshot-Knothole, included, "Subjecting 12 human volunteers and 700 rabbits to the initial light flash from six atomic detonations to investigate its effect on the visual function of the human eyes and to determine the burn injury processes in the dark-adapted rabbit eye," military records show.

The military's use of the word 'volunteer' did not imply that informed consent was obtained. In essence, the subjects were ordered to participate; they were not always told what the risks would be.

In other experiments, airplanes flew through radioactive clouds. A report on one such test, called Operation Plum Bob, begins, "The objective of this project was to measure the radiation dose, both from neutrons and gamma rays, received by an air crew delivering an MB-1 rocket." Crewmen swallowed radiation film to help measure their exposure.

Another test was designed to see how well soldiers could perform after exposure to the flash of atomic detonations at night. "Human volunteers were dark-adapted in a light-tight trailer approximately 10 miles from the detonation. Their eyes were exposed to the flash. Some eyes were protected by a red filter, and some were unprotected."

The notes on the experiment said, "The project was terminated after Shot 4 in order to evaluate the significance of lesions of the retina which were produced in two of the subjects."

About 42 officers were included in a "selected volunteer program" in which they watched an atomic blast from 2,000 yards away. In other experiments, troops were brought to within 5,000 or 7,000 yards of ground zero to watch atomic explosions, and were then marched to the site of the explosion just after the bomb had gone off.

It is not yet known what happened to the subjects of these and other experiments.

In February 1953, after eight years of experiments without a consistent set of rules to govern them, Charles E. Wilson, then Secretary of Defense, prepared a memorandum saying that volunteers should be used as the only "feasible means for realistic evaluation and/or development of effective preventive measures of defense against atomic, biological or chemical agents." The memorandum added, "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential."

It recommended using the Nuremberg Code which, if actually applied, would be stricter than current practices because it required detailed explanations of the hazards of experiments regardless of any claimed benefits, and allowed the subjects to terminate experiments at any moment. But these guidelines remained so highly classified that few if any people below the secretaries of the Army, Navy or Air Force were aware of them.

Staff members of the advisory committee said this created the zen-like question, "What is the effect of adopting ethical guidelines which are then kept top secret?"

A version of this article appears in print on October 12, 1994, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: Panel Finds Wide Debate in 40's On the Ethics of Radiation Tests. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe